Baseball's Welcome Play For Fans

June 12, 1997

The way their seasons have been going, the White Sox and Cubs may not be particularly anxious to play each other. It is bad enough not to have bragging rights in your own league or division; the loser of a city series can't even say it carried its home precinct.

Yet that is part of the fun, and upcoming matchups like theirs--Monday through Wednesday at Comiskey Park--promise to make one of major league baseball's boldest experiments also one of its most intriguing.

For the first time since the National League began in 1876 and the American in 1901, teams from the opposing leagues will play each other during the regular season--starting Thursday night when the San Francisco Giants visit the Texas Rangers.

The Cubs will turn their page of history when they host the Milwaukee Brewers beginning Friday, a pairing that--though not exactly Bears-Packers--has the potential for serious squabbling. The Sox will visit Cincinnati's Reds Friday, a reunion notable mainly for an infamous footnote: The last time these teams played, in the 1919 World Series, the so-called Black Sox not only fell to defeat but to eternal damnation as the only team accused of throwing a Series.

Baseball is attempting this experiment as a strategy to excite and win back fans who deserted the game in droves after the labor ugliness that wiped out the 1994 World Series. And to the extent that there will be some natural marquee rivalries--such as Cubs-White Sox, Yankees-Mets and Canada's own Expos-Blue Jays--it ought to pay off handsomely.

Baseball's purists, however, are in a lather, moaning that it was planned hastily and will strip the game of its uniqueness as the only major sport without interleague play. But it will do nothing to alter the fundamental nature of the game, as do gimmicks like the American League's goofy designated-hitter rule.

Further, it will provide many fans with their only opportunity to see in the flesh such likely future Hall-of-Famers as Frank Thomas, Ryne Sandberg, Ken Griffey Jr., Cal Ripken Jr., Barry Bonds and (ouch) Greg Maddux. Ask the fans, as CBS SportsLine did in a recent poll--63 percent like the idea.

It is a two-year experiment, so there is time to fine-tune it for next season. Already, it has restored one of baseball's grandest traditions: the passion for arguing about the game. Here's a chance for more.